Knowing how to sideboard is one of the most important, but undervalued, aspects of playing a CCG. Even if we win every single game we ever play, half of our games will be post-sideboard. If we want to be successful Star Wars Unlimited players, we’re going to have to figure out how to sideboard well.

With Spark of Rebellion now fully spoiled we can finally start to sideboard properly in Star Wars Unlimited. Sideboarding is all about being able to reconfigure your deck in between games in a best of three match to give you the best shot to win against your current opponent; with the entire set available we are now privy to the potential tools we can reconfigure our decks with.

In Star Wars: Unlimited, we get a 10-card sideboard. A sideboard is part of our decklist, and contains cards that aren’t in our deck for the first game of a best of three match, but in between games we can add to our deck and, if we want, remove cards from the “maindeck” or “preboard” deck that are less effective against our current opponent.

*Disclaimer* This article is written through a competitive lens, meaning these are strategies meant to help us win games of Star Wars Unlimited. If you’re just looking to jam your favorite character into your best friend’s favorite character you should totally do that, it sounds fun! I just happen to hate fun. I’m joking, but what I truly love about card games is trying to figure out why something won or why it lost, and that’s my ethos when I write about them.

You must unlearn what you have learned about decklists

People love talking about lists: “Here’s my list,” “Could you post your list?,” “I play this in my list,” “What was the list????” Without context, I find lists to be largely irrelevant. Unless we have an event or a match that we actually have to choose a decklist for our lists are in a state of flux; we can reflect, adapt, and change them until it’s time to sleeve up, sit down, and jam. If we’re talking about “our list” and not at least thinking if not outright saying “our current list” we’re ignoring the entire card game plane of existence: The Meta™.

I like to look at lists that have won something, or perhaps lost a match I thought they should win, to try and get an understanding of what the pilot was trying to accomplish or perhaps it contains some super sweet tech! But, ultimately I look at lists to best understand The Meta-what’s being played, what’s being played to counter the popular or powerful decks, and everything in between. With a better understanding of The Meta, we can better prepare to face it through thoughtful considerations of our decklists and sideboards.

Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view

This is a gross simplification but there are three types of Star Wars: Unlimited decks currently: Aggro (i.e. Sabine, Leia), Midrange (i.e. Boba, Luke), and Control (i.e. Iden, Palpatine). Aggro decks try to rush down opponents and are generally good against Control, but not as much against Midrange decks that are built to outvalue opposing Aggro decks and outplace slow Control decks.

If we keep those very basic tenets in mind, we can build our main 50 card decks to do what they do best and construct our 10 card sideboards to fix the matchups we’re an underdog against. If we account for The Meta, we want to think about what most people are playing, what’s been winning lately, and if we think it will continue to win or if people will adapt and start beating it. For example, if everyone is playing Aggro, we might want to gear our midrange deck to beat it, or we might want to adjust our deck to be better against Control, which might see a surge in play to defeat all of the Aggro decks that have been dominating lately!

You will only find what you bring in

There are lots of ways to sideboard, but I think of them in three types. Players have their own systems and, as in all facets of life, you should find the thing that works best for you.

Type I: Slight Tweaks

I consider myself a Midrange player at heart: I like to play reactive, taking what my opponent gives me, and Midrange allows me to have a foot in both the Aggro and the Control worlds. When threading that needle, we can design a sideboard that just nudges us to be better against either with a simple sideboard that allows us to slightly reconfigure our deck by lowering/highering the curve or swapping out units that are less effective in certain matchups. Let’s take a look at the Boba Fett list I’ve been running lately as an example.

Boba Fett decks have amazing options at the five drop, but each are good in different situations. Rukh is amazing against Midrange decks that spend all of their resource every turn to play the best possible unit at each cost, and with Energy Conversion Lab he can often kill two strong units. He’s a lot weaker against Aggro because they tend to play lots of smaller units that hit for lots of damage fast; most of our units can trade with our opponent’s Aggro units, and we probably had to use or ECL before the 5R turn to try and stabilize making Rukh even worse in those matches. Having Kallus or Syndicate Lackey in the board will let me add more ambush to my curve, and having Steadfast Battalion lets me have a great way to defeat Leader units, something Boba Fett can struggle with at times. Steadfast Battalion also lets me go a little bit more Aggro in matches where I want to maximize damage, so having a third of him in my Sideboard gives me an additional overwhelmer.

Against Control, a deck that is looking to wipe my units and drop their own game-changing high drops to end a game quickly after stabilizing, I can bring Change of Heart in over slow and clunky AT-STs. There’s nothing quite like Claiming initiative early and then immediately Change of Hearting an Avenger or Devastator!

Control decks often have to diversify their unit removal because of all the different potential units they could face, but after game one of a best of three Control Pilots can make minor tweaks to their deck configuration by using the best available removal or simply taking out cards that are “dead” in the matchup and adding as much removal as possible. In a midrange heavy meta, we might not want to run more than one Bombing Run, but if we know we’re facing Aggro and its armada of snub fighters, we’re going to want to sideboard in the maximum.

A sideboard package I like in Command Control decks is to add Yularen, Escort Skiff, and Consortium StarVipers (if you don’t have them in already!). This is a slight tweak in a few ways: it lowers our curve a little bit to allow us some early trades with opposing decks, it gives us a little bit of healing/Restore in Yularen and StarViper, and making our deck a bit greener helps Yularen and Skiff maximize their potential.

Type II: Adding Tools We Don’t Already Have

Some cards do something so specific that we can’t include enough of that thing to make it a major strategy for our deck, and often times we don’t even want to because strong (but niche) abilities are sometimes attached to units with weak stats.

In Aggro, Wolffe and SpecForce Soldier are two great examples of limited tools that we might not always want in our maindeck. Right now, SpecForce is seeing a lot of maindeck play because he’s Heroic and thus makes our For A Cause I Believe Ins better, but as more Heroic cards are released it’s possible he’s relegated to a sideboard card. Wolffe is often not in many maindecks, especially as a 3x, because he’s not Heroic and thus makes those FACIBIs worse. But, if we’re playing against Iden, Krennic, Luke, or another deck we expect to have lots of Restore we probably want to maximize the only anti-healing play with have at the moment.

Aggro decks might also not always want to be The Beatdown in the mirror. If we have an idea about when we want to become the Control player in an Aggro mirror, we may want to add some of the premium Red removal available to us in our sideboard. Force Choke, Open Fire, and Bombing Run all damage units at a high enough clip for a low enough cost that we could fit them into our Aggro decks if we think controlling is a better strategy than bashing base (more on this later).

Cards that shut down other cards are virtually nonexistent in Unlimited, but a card like Regional Governor is great out of the sideboard once we’ve seen what our opponent’s deck can do and if we have answers for it.

Control decks can stabilize against Boba Fett decks that take control of the board early and try to win off tempo plays. We might look at bringing in The Emperor’s Legion to refill our hand if we ever get board wiped after over-extending and cut things like Waylay that don’t pay off against the kinds of value units Control decks run: Vader, Dooku, Ruthless Raider, etc.

Another interesting piece of sideboard tech is running off-aspect cards that will be completely unexpected by our opponents. An Overwhelming Barrage that costs 7 doesn’t seem like bad value when it’s creating a two (or three) for one. Also, a card like Cunning or Vigilance is so strong that we might want to pay 6 for it in certain situations. The biggest aspect of bringing these kinds of cards in is that our opponents won’t play around them the way they will a Bombing Run or a Superlaser Blast: typical cards we expect to run into post-sideboard. These strong events can be further aided by Bib Fortuna lessening the burden of the off-aspect tax.

Type III: Transformational

Star Wars: Unlimited is so new and its mechanics so basic that having a truly transformational sideboard after one set is almost impossible, but not completely. One of the best ways to transform your entire deck after sideboarding is to switch your win condition; a classic example from Magic: The Gathering is to play a creatureless control deck game one and then sideboard in a bunch of powerful creatures once our opponent has sideboarded out all its creature removal.

While winning by decking out is an option in Unlimited, there probably aren’t enough cards that actually discard our opponent’s cards from the top of their deck to make it viable… yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t transform!

I alluded to it above but some Aggro decks might want to become more controlling if they think they’re better in the Aggro mirror. For example, a Command Sabine deck using ECL might want to sideboard in Zeb, who is a complete and utter blowout in Aggro mirrors, especially against a Leia deck using Tarkintown as a base or a Sabine deck using Jedha City. In order to get their deck to survive until Zeb can take over, cutting weaker units like 2/2s or situational cards that push damage like Heroic Sacrifice for premium removal like Open Fire turns them into more of a Control deck. We can even go bigger by adding Black One and Mace Windu!

Similarly, midrange decks might want to become more Aggro against Control decks by cutting weak and situational cards for more high damage or high tempo plays. I really like turning Command Luke into a Rebel Aggro deck by cutting Yodas, Home Ones and adding more two drops and Wing Leaders to fight alongside some of its already hard hitting units like Battlefield Marine, Echo Base defender, and Kanan Jarrus.

We can go a similar route with a Boba Fett deck that plays game one a little more controlling but then sideboards into Steadfast Battallions and Surprise Strikes.

The great thing about playtesting, sideboarding, and weaponizing The Meta is that these ideas go both ways: we can start our Midrange deck angled to beat Control, Aggro, or the mirror, and then prepare our sideboard to adjust to our weaker matchups. Knowing the different configurations our decks can be allows us to adjust them when the time finally comes for us to submit a decklist at an event or for a league match.

Always in motion is the future

These are our first steps into sideboarding in Star Wars Unlimited, and I hope this helped contextualize the importance of it as opposed to building a 50-card list. More experienced CCG players likely already have systems in place that they like to employ when grinding, and likely found a lot of the above very basic; But fundamentals are important and graduate level content will begin around set 2.

Please reach out and let me know if you think about sideboarding differently, I’m always looking to learn new ways to strategize!

And, as always, thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire

Interested in competitive content? Check out my team’s YouTube Channel! We post competitive video content a few days a week and recently launched a competitive-minded Star Wars Unlimited Podcast!